The invention and development of memory devices are important tasks for facilitating continued innovation in the field of information technology. The authors achieve repeatable switching between a high-resistivity charge-crystalline (or charge-ordered) state and a low-resistivity quenched charge glass via both optical and electrical heating in an organic conductor, θ-(BEDT-TTF)₂X$. They observe switching that is one order of magnitude faster in another isostructural organic conductor that requires faster cooling ($>{10}³$ K/s) to kinetically avoid charge crystallization, indicating that the material's critical cooling rate can be a useful guideline for pursuing a faster ``correlated-electron phase-change memory (PCM)''. These results establish a clear case whereby practically stable glassy electronic states hidden behind long-range ordered states can be uncovered by adopting hitherto-untried quenching rates and thus underlies a new class of non-volatile PCM.
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Ôike et al. (2015) studied this question.